Many systems provide for use of up-to-date content on an aircraft by delivering portable entertainment media, such as videotape or digital versatile disc (DVD) to the aircraft prior to take-off. This procedure, of course, requires the physical creation of a master, duplication for every aircraft to be fitted, distribution of appropriate quantities to airport locations, and timely transfer of tapes/disks onto the aircraft. This procedure, however, does not provide for delivery of other data to the aircraft or data from the aircraft. Also, this process is very labor intensive, slow to distribute, and does not support any airline or flight related data on or off of the aircraft.
Newer digital systems that use digital servers for content storage and distribution provide up-to-date content to the aircraft by secure electronic transfer of the master over the Internet, for example, to a facility at or near the airport. At this facility, the content can be copied onto media appropriate for the aircraft (CD, DVD, memory stick) on an as-required basis to meet aircraft arriving at the gate. The media is carried to the gate and installed into the system of the aircraft. This approach significantly reduces the time and expense of physically shipping media to the various airports. Although this process is much faster in delivery and redistributes the labor effort to the various airport locations, it still requires the physical delivery of devices (CD, DVD, memory stick) to the aircraft at the gate. While such a device could also be loaded with some airline data, the timing of making the device probably does not permit it to contain any flight related data, such as passenger manifest data. If a writable device such as a memory stick is used, the same device can be used to offload aircraft data for physical transfer to an airport ground facility. However, this process is generally very labor intensive.
An industry concept commonly called “Gatelink” has been discussed in the industry for years. This concept requires a network to be wired to each airport gate, and a wired or wireless connection between the gate and the aircraft. Early attempts used optical links (e.g., infrared links), and an industry standard was developed, but the resulting products were commercially unsuccessful. More recently, common wireless local area network standards (such as IEEE 802.11a/b/g) have been identified and included within new Avionics standards (ARINC 763). While this standard is more than 5 years old, few airports have permitted its incorporation into the airport infrastructure.
With the “Gatelink” approach, the aircraft is recognized by the network when it arrives at the gate. Flight related data can be transferred off of the aircraft to a server on the ground. Also, any material appropriate for the flight, including airline operations data, flight related data including a passenger manifest, and up-to-date content, can be loaded onto the aircraft. This is a far superior technical approach toward moving data on and off of the aircraft. However, the short range of wireless local area network protocols requires that the implementation involve modification of the airport facility all the way to the actual aircraft gate.
Broadband satellite communications can be used to exchange significant amounts of data between the flying aircraft and the ground. Performance of these systems varies between the lower speed satellite communications (SATCOM) based systems (X.25, Swift64 or BGAN) to the higher speed KU band systems (ConneXion, Row44). In general, these satellite links are limited to between 64 Kbps and 20 Mbps. This bandwidth must be shared by all users in a large geographical area. In addition, the current regulations on aircraft based KU Band service do not permit aircraft to ground transmission to occur while the aircraft is on the ground. A single channel would be shared by many different aircraft at many different airports.
Cellular networks can also be used to transfer information to and from an aircraft while it is on the ground, but the bandwidth supported by such networks is at least an order of magnitude less than what is required to load the target content.